We are Cross-Cultural Philology, a Cluster funded through the Excellence Strategy of the German Research Foundation (DFG). Our aim is to conduct transcultural and interdisciplinary research into cultural and philological practices from a global perspective and from a wide variety of viewpoints, drawing on material from the last 5000 years of human history to do so.
The Cluster of Excellence “Cross-Cultural Philology”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), is an interdisciplinary research network comprising 25 departments at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (primary host) and Julius-Maximilian Universität in Würzburg, working in collaboration with a wide range of national and international institutions, universities, and research organisations.
Together, the members of the Cluster explore 5,000 years of cultural history – from multiple perspectives, across cultures, and with a solid historical foundation, all while showing the enormous relevance of philology to the present day. Across a total of five Research Areas and three Transversal Perspectives, the Cluster investigates how and by whom knowledge has been transmitted over the millennia, across borders, and between cultures. Within this framework, individual projects are devoted to such topics as editorial practices, issues of canon formation, censorship, and the annotation, archiving, movement, and translation of texts.
The members of the Cluster are drawn from 25 philologically oriented disciplines across seven faculties at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich (LMU), from the Department of Egyptology at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität in Würzburg (JMU), and from the LMU Centre for Digital Humanities.
The Cluster began on 1 January 2026 and has been approved for an initial funding phase of seven years. The spokesperson for the Cluster of Excellence is Prof. Dr. Beate Kellner. The deputy spokespersons are Prof. Dr Holger Gzella and Prof. Dr. Susanne Reichlin.